


Insatiable (The Voracious Remix)

by samalander



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Magic, Canon-Typical Violence, Emptiness, F/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Non-human characters, vampirism of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has always held life in the palm of her hand and watched it flicker, always inhaled and let the warmth of another fill her until she burns again, until she feels that throb under her skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insatiable (The Voracious Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/gifts).
  * Inspired by [5 Times the Black Widow Played with Her Food and Hawkeye Watched](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2098014) by [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname). 



> With thanks to enigma731 for the beta and gentle prodding to get it done.

The arrow is made of ash, and he aims it at her mouth, and not her heart.

 _Good,_ she thinks, _he's done his homework._.

* * *

Natasha has always held life in the palm of her hand and watched it flicker, always inhaled and let the warmth of another fill her until she burns again, until she feels that throb under her skin.

The man at her feet had been an easy kill; she'd simply appeared at his gala in a dark gown, her hair red as blood and her skin white as snow, and brought him to his knees.

There are a thousand ways she could have done it-- there are men and women dead in their beds, pleasure still etched across their brittle faces, her fingerprints still cold on their cheeks and the aftertaste of their lives still warm in her mouth. And there are bodies in alleyways and canals, their features twisted in horror.

She kills like she breathes, easily and simply. She doesn't remember when she started. She doesn't remember a childhood. She just remembers hunger, and need, and killing.

* * *

Clint is a creature of spaces, a being that inhabits the betweens. He doesn't know how to be anything else, how to see an emptiness and not consume it.

He ate the vacuum of his childhood, holding onto the yawning chasms inside of his family until they unraveled. He devoured the desolation as he traveled, the faint hopes and useless dreams of circus patrons and the sorrowful voids he found in the hearts of the men and the women he loved. It wasn't enough, it was never enough. Nothing into nothing was still nothing, and Clint has never been anything at all.

He tried to swallow the desert, when he was sent there, and he tried to hold the lonely spaces as they followed him through life. But there was no way to be around people, no way to make a connection and find a kindred soul without taking them, without consuming. 

And then he finds her. The woman in the cold isn't empty, but she is emptiness. She doesn't have any spaces for him to worm into, any cracks he can find to get at her isolation and take it for his own. He watches her until she takes a victim, until she kisses the man at the gala and comes away full, having filled herself with the his life.

Clint points the arrow at her mouth, and he waits.

* * *

_What are you?_ he asks.

 _What are you?_ she replies, as if it were an answer.

Neither speaks again, but the silence is comfortable-- it is a sprawling, empty plane, and they both feel at home in the bleakness. He offers his hand, and she takes it.

* * *

She kills like a dance, like something beautiful. She kills quickly, except when she feels playful, cruel. Then she taunts, darting here and there, taking and taking and giving a little back just to snatch it away again.

He can eat the spaces she leaves, savor them as she steals the life of her victim. The best are the ones who don't even know it's happening. The ones who she gives her body to, slipping them moments of kindness and joy and pleasure, so they don't even feel the emptiness growing, don't know they're being killed until they're dead.

Clint could spend a lifetime watching her kill like that, could get enough from one of those victims that he'd never need to eat again.

But the abyss inside him grows, even as he struggles to fill it with more nothing.

* * *

The first time she feeds on him, it's an accident.

They're on a mission with SHIELD, in a cold arctic base, searching out a man with a weapon that could end the world.

(Clint says that the end of the world seems fine to him. He says it seems like it would be full of enough abandoned space that he'd never need to consume another person ever again, but it would leave Natasha starving, so he agrees to fight.)

They disable the weapon and he helps her into the quinjet at the end of the mission. Smoking rubble and vacant bodies litter the snow in their wake.

She's been injured, which is rare. Not many things can hurt her-- bullets have no effect, but the weapons these men have shoot fire, and Natasha can be burned. Her clothing is melted into her skin, a mess of fiber and blood and tissue. Clint wonders at the blood, that she has blood the same way he does, the same way their meals do.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, as he settles her into a seat in the back. 

"No," he tells her, slipping up to the cockpit to take off, to set a course for home. He likes flying, likes the feeling of the sky around him, the way clouds can be nothing and still have shape. Sometimes Clint thinks he might be a cloud, might be the kind of thing that's made of vapor, and only exists until it dissolves. He takes a minute to admire the space above the world, the secret place he'd like to call his own, before heading back to Natasha.

"How do you heal?" he asks, because it's never come up before. They've been partners for three months, run maybe ten ops, and he's never seen her get more than a hangnail or a split lip.

"I'm sorry," she says again.

Clint opens his mouth to protest, to tell her there's nothing to apologize for, but she lifts her hand and plucks his breath from his mouth. He feels it go, feels the parts of him that are him slowly slide out. 

_So this is how I die_ he thinks, but he doesn't even feel angry. He always thought it would be violent, that he'd end in a crush of things and feelings and people. But this feels right. She could have asked, sure, but he thinks that he would have said yes, if she did. This is how he'll die, and this is how he should die.

Natasha moves again, reaches out to take another piece of him. Clint can't even recoil, anchored to the spot by her, by fear, by the sudden awareness of life thrumming through his veins. He watches as she moves a third time, and a fourth, her skin starting to knit together as she consumes him.

He feels hollow, but that's nothing new, and as she continues, he's relieved to find he's not getting weaker. He can't move, but he isn't dying.

She pauses and watches him for a moment. "Is this okay?" she asks.

Clint nods, and Natasha takes another piece of him.

When she stops again, her skin is whole and the hunger is gone from her eyes. She releases him; Clint can move, and he sits, suddenly, on the floor. 

"You're not dead," she says, her voice rich with confusion.

He feels the same emptiness inside, the same hunger he always feels, and he gropes blindly, seeking to take from her like she took from him. He picks her confusion and swallows it whole, keeping it and making it his.

"What are you doing?" she asks, locking her eyes on his even as a shudder rocks her body.

Her gaze is hot, and Clint wants more, wants to feel her body, her heat. "Kiss me," he says.

Natasha leans forward, brushing her lips against his.

Clint has spent his whole life hungry, but the need he feels for her touch is so intense, so sudden and all-consuming that he can barely stand it. He's felt empty before, he's seen the greatest wide-open spaces and taken them in, but Natasha is more. She's vast and infinite and barren in the most beautiful of ways.

"What are you?" he asks, shivering at the intensity of her touch.

"Hungry," she replies, kissing him again, her fingers in his hair. "Starving."

* * *

Her bed is never empty, and her arms are warm. He can take from her, and she can take from him, and neither ever loses what they willingly give.

There are times when Clint wonders what would have happened, what his life would have been like if he’d fired the arrow that night, if she'd consumed him before he had the chance, if their choices had been just slightly different.

But then she kisses him, and the hunger crests, and he has to have her.

And after, lying together, their chests heaving and their legs tangled, sometimes she looks up at him and smiles.

"I love you," she tells him, and Clint kisses her gently, the hollowness of her words irresistible.

* * *

Natasha has always held life in the palm of her hand and watched it flicker, always inhaled and let the warmth of another fill her until she burns again, until she feels that throb under her skin.

And with Clint, lying in his bed, her head on his chest so she can hear the thump of his heart, feel the short breaths as he falls into sleep, sometimes she thinks she might actually know what it's like to be happy.

"I love you," he tells her, his fingers twirling strands of her hair around themselves, and Natasha kisses his jaw, taking the little bits of his life that he surrenders, and nothing more.


End file.
